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ADDRESS 



OF 



Hon. Philander Chase Knox 



AT THE 



DEDICATION OF THE MONUMENT 
ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF 



Major-General Edward Braddock 



IN 



BRADDOCK MEMORIAL PARK 

FAYETTE COUNTY. PENNSYLVANIA 

OCTOBER 15th, 1913 






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Upon a modest tablet nearby, amidst the 
beauty and quiet of these protecting moun- 
tains, there is carved a sentence which dis- 
closes the reason why we are here today to 
honor the memory of a valiant British officer. 
This tablet marks the resting place of an 
ensign of the French army who fell in an 
engagement with Major George Washington's 
command in what the tablet describes as "the 
first conflict at arms between the French and 
English for supremacy in the Mississippi 
Valley." The struggle thus precipitated be- 
tween the French and English in which 
General Braddock so soon became conspic- 
uously prominent might with accuracy have 
been more broadly stated as one immediately 
involving Anglo-Saxon supremacy in North 
America, the primacy of the English-speaking 
people in moulding and conserving the civili- 



zation of the West and more remotely the 
readjustment of the poHtical equihbrium of 
the world. 

For more than a century after the set- 
tlement of Jamestown in Virginia by the 
English the Atlantic seaboard furnished a 
sufficient outlet for the energies and aspira- 
tions of the western European colonists who 
were attracted hither, not so much by the 
spirit of conquest and adventure, as to find 
permanent homes and freedom from religious 
intolerance and persecution. During this 
period the French, animated mainly by a 
desire for adventure and religious expansion 
and having control of the St. Lawrence and 
the lower Mississippi rivers, two of the three 
available highways leading to the rich and 
boundless wilderness constituting the heart of 
this continent, had pressed forward so that 
by the middle of the eighteenth century a 
cordon of fortified posts, favored by friendly 



native allies, connected their outlying posi- 
tions in Canada and the Northwest with the 
French settlement at New Orleans. 

The merest glance at any early eighteenth 
century map of North America, depicting 
political claims, will be sufficient for a full 
appreciation of the struggle that was impend- 
ing between two great European powers, dis- 
close the magnitude of the issue rapidly ap- 
proaching a definite settlement and suggest 
the point of earliest conflict between them. 
British territory would there appear but to 
fringe the Atlantic coast while all the space 
beyond stretching toward the Pacific, the 
Mexican Gulf and the Arctic snows, would 
be seen to constitute the circumscribing areas 
of New France. 
1 " The Scotch-Irish and German emigration 
of the second quarter of the eighteenth cen- 
tury sought and found their homes beyond the 
Allegheny Mountains and settled at and ad- 



jacent to the headwaters of the Ohio river,— 
the remaining unguarded portal to the rich 
empire beyond. The activities of these colo- 
nists and the measures taken for their protec- 
tion determined the expedition of 1753 sent 
by Virginia under the command of George 
Washington and the attempted construction 
of a fort at the confluence of the Allegheny 
and Monongahela rivers. This manifestation 
of a fixed purpose of these colonists to hold 
and defend the gatev^ay to the West alarmed 
the French Canadian Governor-General Du- 
quesne and he dispatched a force to break 
up the intrusion upon and menace to the ter- 
ritorial claims of his sovereign. The expul- 
sion of Washington from the forks of the 
Ohio and the construction at that point of 
Fort Duquesne by the French marked the 
time as just at hand vs^hen the arbitrament of 
w^ar alone could adjust the conflicting claims 
of the French and English to be masters of 

6 



a new world. Events now moved with ra- 
pidity. An accidental meeting near this 
spot between a detachment of French sol- 
diers and the men under Washmgton's com- 
mand brought on the conflict to which I have 
already alluded and the initial shot was fired 
in the Seven Years' War, which was to close 
a seventy years' contest for race supremacy 
on the western half of the globe. —^ 

The fowling pieces of the Virginia woods- 
men which broke the silence of the dawn of 
that May day in 1 754 demanded the perma- 
nent settlement of what has been termed 
"the most momentous and far-reaching ques- 
tion ever brought to issue on this conti- 
nent." 

The engagements immediately following 
this skirmish were disastrous to the British 
authority and after Washington's retreat 
from Fort Necessity the French were left 
in undj-- >» -z; possession of the territory 



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lying west of the Alleghenies, including, of 
course, the all-important Ohio gateway to 
the West. J 

The colonies though stunned and as- 
tounded by their repulses responded slowly 
and grudgingly to the demands of the situa- 
tion, and indeed the gravity and import of 
what had occurred and was impending 
dawned but slowly upon the home govern- 
ment. However, in January, 1755, His 
Majesty's Government was sufficiently aroused 
^l to despatch an expedition to Virginia under 
command of Major-General Edward Brad- 
dock, a tried and trusted officer of the Cold- 
stream Guards, selected for this campaign by 
the Duke of Cumberland, the Commander- 
in-Chief of the British army and himself a 
Colonel of that famous troop. 

The story of Braddock's expedition 
to Fort Duquesne is too well known to 
justify repetition here. Hulbert justly says. 



"Whatever Braddock's faults and foibles he 
accompHshed a great feat in leading a com- 
paratively powerful army across the Alle- 
ghenies and had he been decently supported 
by the colonies there would have been no 
doubt of his success. As it was, shamefully 
hampered and delayed by the procrastinating 
indifference of the colonies, deceived and 
defrauded by wolfish contractors, abandoned 
by the Indians because of the previous 
neglect of the colonial governors and assem- 
blies, nevertheless the campaign was a dis- 
tinct success until at the last moment Fate 
capriciously dashed the chalice from Brad- 
dock's lips." That he recognized before his 
death that his plan of battle with the savage 
allies of the French was a mistake is certain 
from his dying statement that "we will 
know better next time." He paid for his 
lack of knowledge of novel conditions with 
his life. The greatest successes are fre- 

9 



quently based upon corrected errors of our 
own or others. Sacrifices and defeats seem 
to be necessary to the attainment of large 
ends and just credit is due those who, with 
noble and intelHgent purpose, endure the 
defeats and make the sacrifices. 

In every such conflict some must perish, 
as Braddock, amidst the humiliating environ- 
ment of defeat while to others it is decreed 
that they shall die like the illustrious Wolfe 
upon the Plains of Abraham, whose expiring 
vision beheld the complete and ultimate vic- 
tory of his country's arms in the war Brad- , 
dock had so inauspiciously begun. I 

I have briefly stated the magnitude of 
the cause for which Braddock's life was 
given and there is authority for the statement 
that he took a large view of the enterprise 
upon which he was about to embark and 
realized its significance and scope. He is 
quoted as saying before leaving England that 



10 



he was "going with a handful of men to 
conquer whole nations and was sent Hke a 
sacrifice to the ahar." When we consider 
the stupendous result of that conflict, how 
that, as Parkman says, " it gave England the 
control of the seas and the mastery of North 
America and India, made her the first of 
commercial nations and prepared that vast 
colonial system that has planted New Eng- 
land in every part of the globe and supplied 
to the United States the indispensable con- 
dition of their greatness, if not of their 
nation's existence," we must surely and un- 
qualifiedly appreciate the commendable 
motives and broad vision of the people of 
Fayette County who, to perpetuate the 
knowledge of Braddock's sacrifice in the 
great conflict which has brought so much 
good to this land, have caused this monu- 
ment to be erected and this park to be es- 
tablished in his memory. 

11 



What Washington and Braddock began 
here Wolfe concluded at Quebec and Great 
Britain succeeded to the dominion and guid- 
ance of a new world. The conflict, however, 
had created conditions out of which it was 
inevitable that a new Anglo-Saxon govern- 
ment should be born to assume as an heritage 
the responsibilities thus imposed upon the 
English-speaking race. 

The earlier stages of the contest found 
the colonies disunited, envious, jealous and 
distrustful of each other. Theretofore no suf- 
ficiently compelling reason had induced any- 
thing like real cohesion and co-ordination 
among them for the general good. 

While it is true that the necessity for 
providing means to insure the friendship of 
the Six Nations had led to the Albany Con- 
ference of 1 754 at which Franklin proposed 
a federal union containing what Alexis de 
Tocqueville pronounced "a great discovery 



12 



in modern political science" that is a feder- 
ation operating directly upon the citizen and 
not upon the corporate political units of the 
federation. Yet though later this was to 
become the cornerstone of our present system 
of government, the colonies rejected Frank- 
lin's plan with practical unanimity. The 
necessity for national existence had not yet 
assumed its proper relation to narrower and 
local interests, although the conditions of the 
period were rapidly demanding the evolution 
of some form of national life. The pressure 
of the common danger was more acutely felt 
as the Lilies of France were advanced 
towards the older English settlements and 
the serious deliberation upon the philosophy 
of government and searching examination 
into the science of politics which had be- 
come the habit of those mighty intellects 
"which were not the product of the time but 
which produced the age in which they lived ; 

13 



its impulse and its purposes," presaged early 
steps towards the realization of national am- 
bitions. It was a time in which the writings 
of Hobbes, Harrington, Sidney, Grotius, 
Locke, Puffendorf, Montesquieu and Black- 
stone were eagerly sought after, studied and 
discussed. Burke said, speaking of this era, 
"in no country in the world was the law 
so generally studied." It was not strange, 
therefore, that the interaction of these mighty 
intellects, stimulated by the perils of the 
Seven Years' War and later by various 
grievances against the British Crown, should 
have produced a purpose beyond the require- 
ments of the moment even to the establish- 
ment of the truly independent national exist- 
ence they so soon thereafter achieved. 

Thus the Government of the United 
States was born and succeeded to the 
responsibilities relinquished by Great Britain 
for the advancement of the honor, the 

14 



interests and the prestige of the race and 
the discharge of the obligation to be mind- 
ful of the welfare and progress of the 
other peoples of the hemisphere which our 
preponderance and propinquity entail. 

Such an occasion as this presents the 
opportunity for glancing at some of the 
larger aspects of our neighborly obliga- 
tions. 

That we should mutually enjoy the 
possession of this vast northern continent 
with the people of the British Dominion 
who represent the other branch of our race 
is the natural, logical and inevitable result 
of forces that began their operation when 
North America was first settled by Western 
Europeans. Our attitude towards our broth- 
ers of the north should be free from artifi- 
cial barriers. We are two peoples who 
enjoy the same climate and the same or 
complementary natural conditions of soil, 



15 



waters and products ; two peoples whose 
homogeneity rests upon origin, contiguity 
and interdependence and not upon pohtical 
affiliations. 

The goal in the onward march of Western 
civilization will not have been reached until 
the processes which have been going on for 
more than two centuries have welded these 
two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race 
into a substantially homogenous people. A 
continuing closer racial economic and moral 
union involves no political change, annexa- 
tion or absorption. It is probably more true 
today than ever before that the weight of 
sentiment and opinion, both in Canada and 
the United States, while desiring closer rela- 
tions in all other respects, is fixed in the 
belief that the present political status is de- 
sirable and will lead to the best develop- 
ment of each nation and better and more 
satisfactory relations between them. 

16 



As I have said on a previous occasion, in 
the higher atmosphere and broader aspects of 
the situation it is certain that, w^hatever our 
poHtical differences, if there should be any 
great world movement involving this conti- 
nent, if it should ever be made the battle- 
field or the barrier in a conflict between two 
civilizations, Canada and the United States 
would, as a matter of course, act in the most 
perfect concert in defense of the common 
rights of a common blood. 

Concurrently with the colonization of the 
North by the Anglo-Saxon the conquest of 
the South by his Latin brother was proceeding 
apace. It is not an accident that the results 
in the two continents were so different. They 
were determined by fundamental and con- 
trolling causes. 

In appraising the relation of these results 
to the civilization of the world no just con- 
clusion is possible without taking into account 



17 



the impulses and purposes that inspired the 
colonization of the one and the conquest of 
the other. 

During all the early discoveries, redis- 
coveries and invasions of the South the object 
was plunder. The followers of Columbus, 
Ovando and their successors enslaved the 
simple inhabitants of the New World and 
exploited its resources with commercial greedi- 
ness and reckless cruelty. The trusting natives 
were lured from place to place in the ships 
of their conquerors who represented them- 
selves as messengers from the paradise of 
their ancestors come to convey them to realms 
of blissful ease, but who in reality held them 
in cruel slavery to search for gold. 

Mr. Cyril Campbell in a recent contribu- 
tion to Blackwoods says, "From the com- 
mencement the pioneers in the Virginias and 
elsewhere migrated thither with the intention 
of permanent settlement. Bigotry and intol- 

18 



erance had driven them from their old home 
in search of a purer air, but the memories, the 
customs and traditions of their race were 
graven indeHbly in their minds. 

The model of the old laws was before 
them and in founding a new constitution they 
had only to reject what was putrid and corrupt, 
to retain all that was sound and good. So 
even when the immense wealth of the new 
country was developed the structure with- 
stood the strain and temptation of sudden 
success for it was founded on a rock. 

In the South the case was otherwise. 
For decades it had been the paradise of the 
adventurer. The Spaniards and Portuguese 
who drained it of its gold and its life-blood 
were no martyrs or victims of implacable 
persecution. They were for the most part 
needy, out-at-elbows gentlemen, discontented 
with the meager stuffing of their purses. 
One object they had in view, plunder, so 

19 



that they might return as soon as possible 
and ruffle it with the best in Lisbon or 
Madrid. Of late years that has changed, it 
is true, since the yoke of Spain and Portugal 
has been cast aside. Since the coffee of 
Brazil, the rich pampas of the Argentine, the 
nitrates of Chile have pointed a royal road 
to wealth it has become the refuge of the 
over-crowded Latin nations, but even now 
the leaders are but feebly groping for sta- 
bility. The habits of centuries are not 
lightly thrown aside and the old parasitism, 
the feeling of getting what one can out of 
the country is hard to kill." 

I quote this strong statement because it 
so lucidly shows the vicious ante-natal in- 
fluences with which the republics of the South 
have had to contend and the magnitude of 
the handicap some of them still carry in their 
honest efforts to attain worthy and stable na- 
tional life through governments founded on 

20 



freedom of conscience and security of indi- 
vidual rights. 

Having ourselves achieved this lofty ideal 
our attitude tow^ards those less forward in ac- 
complishment has always been one of sympa- 
thy and generally one of helpfulness. 

Unfortunately at times the best inten- 
tioned efforts of this Government to render 
real and practical help to those sorely in need 
have miscarried, sometimes through misun- 
derstanding, sometimes through misrepresen- 
tation and other methods entirely unworthy, 
and sometimes through unpardonable apathy. 

When in the days of the discoverers the 
grievances of the docile natives of the Carib- 
bean islands, who were ruled by neither 
justice, wisdom nor humanity, were carried 
to Spain, the royal consciences were soothed 
by empty phrases thrown prettily together 
and "out of the mist of foolish words there 
came down a rain of blood." It would be 

21 



shameful for us similarly to triHe with serious 
appeals for substantial moral and material 
aid from weaker nations, treat flippantly or 
with smug indifference cases of evident 
distress, to halt or enfeeble performance by 
indulging a national vanity for the repetition 
of fine words concernmg mfeasible theories 
of international duty or to cheapen and belit- 
tle our influence by adjusting our policies to 
meet the exigencies of domestic politics. 

Although centuries are but days in the 
life of nations yet in the brief period that 
has elapsed since the eventful occurrences 
here the English-speaking people have mul- 
tiplied prodigiously. 

This marvelous expansion in numbers 
represents a corresponding enlargement of 
responsibility. We can only achieve the 
full duty cast upon us by the course of 
events having a real beginning near this 
spot by comprehensive and thoughtful con- 

22 



sideration of all the factors in the problems 
as they are presented, undisturbed by the 
cacophonies of those who are blinded by 
thoughtlessness, interest or prejudice. In this 
way we will disclose an inclination and 
capacity to discharge our obligations to less 
fortunate nations so that results will not be 
accidents but the fruits of matured and 
intelligent policies that will reflect credit 
upon the hegemony of our race and further 
advance the influence of Anglo-Saxon civili- 
zation. 

Great as has been the glory in having 

attained our present position in the new 

world a greater glory will be to have con- 

'^uted to the unity, happiness and pros- 

of all its people in a sympathetic, 

d unselfish way without offense to 

^mour-propre or encroachment 

^ifi[n powers. 



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